I had a customer in my taxi last night who was complaining miserably about the breakfast in their hotel.
She had wanted to stay at the first three syllables of Aphrodite’s Lodge, but they had been regrettably booked up, and so they had been obliged to stay at an inferior establishment which only offered an Oriental Breakfast.
Obviously I was intrigued. I had just been at my Creative Writing class, and was interested, from an apprentice novelist’s point of view, to learn more about new experiences, so I enquired further.
She looked puzzled.
“Well, it’s Weetabix an’ that,” she said, fluttering her dense, inch-long eyelashes and settling her leopard-skin coat on the seat.
I agreed that the hotel in question was no place for ladies of her obvious sophistication, which was a waste of a fib because I still only got a forty pence tip.
In fact I had got absolutely no room to talk about sophistication, because we had just been talking in my class about a book which everyone had enjoyed except me. I had felt affronted because it had little tiny bits of writing with big gaps between it, and not many pages. I might have mentioned before that when I pay £8.99 for a book I jolly well like to get my money’s worth, although if I am strictly honest I didn’t because it was second-hand on Amazon.
Everybody else had appreciated the lyrical poetry of the style, and I had become irritated with it for repeating sentences over and over again. The teacher explained that this was for dramatic effect, but again, I like my money’s worth out of a book and if a book is only about sixty pages long to start off with, I jolly well want to see something different on every page, not something that I have read three times already.
I thought it was twaddle, and said so, but I was a lone voice, and perhaps should have bought myself a leopard-skin dress to wear whilst I said it.
I had loved the other book we had read, so much so that I had been terribly disappointed when it ended, but almost nobody else did, so maybe I am just a natural philistine.
I really ought to have spent the day writing my homework assignment, which has got to be a thousand words long, and is supposed to be creatively written. So far I have not written a single word, creative or otherwise, and I am not going to get it done this evening either.
This is because this evening we are expecting visitors. Mark’s mother is coming for dinner and bringing a friend.
She is not the sort of person who would care if we had tidied up or not, but I had Mark at home for the day and it seemed to be a good excuse, so I explained that we could not possibly entertain his long-lost mother, whom we have not seen since before bat flu, in a house that needed dusting.
This was brilliant. Instead of disappearing into his shed to mess about with his home-made nuclear fusion machine, he stayed in the house and hoovered and polished and cleaned alongside me.
We washed the dresser and cleaned the conservatory and polished the grandfather clock and hid the half-finished jigsaw under the sofa.
We had to do a lot of cleaning because the tiresome dog has had a digestive problem, and seems to be having an inadvertent self-emptying occurrence every now and again. Obviously we have cleaned this up but it has left the house smelling so disgusting that it gave Mark bad dreams last night.
Worse, it is entirely his own fault for eating something revolting he discovered in the Library Gardens last night.
The dog, not Mark, obviously.
Hence we have told him that if he does not get better we are going to send him to an animal research facility, and they can jolly well experiment on him to see if they can find a cure for Alzheimer’s, which seems to be his distinguishing feature at the moment.
The house is now immaculate. We have scrubbed every last trace of indigestion out of the conservatory, and lit beautiful scented candles. Dinner is ready, and I might even have time to write the first couple of sentences of the thousand words that are hanging over me.
It’s a shame we are having visitors.
We will probably drink too much and have to clear up all over again tomorrow.
